Reading and Escapism! - By Dr Luke Deckard

Raymond Chandler criticised Dorothy L Sayers in his essay The Simple Art of Murder (1950) for commenting that crime fiction wasn’t a serious type of literature but one of escapism. She’s not the only one to snub the genre that was an author’s bread and butter. Before Sayers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously hated Sherlock Holmes! He didn’t want to be remembered solely for that character because he felt they were silly, unimportant stories. 

I can imagine Raymond Chandler sitting at his desk, reading these quotes while swishing a glass of whisky, pausing to look at his cat and huff. Chandler’s rebuttal to Sayers was simple: all pleasurable reading is a form of escapism. If that meant your jam was mathematics, philosophy, or Western or romance, that was fine. Chandler disagreed with Sayers’s implication that escapist literature is essentially dumb and unimportant literature. 

Nevertheless, this attitude persists today. I once read a press release for a book described as a “frothy thriller” That baffled me! A book without substance! I would be devastated if my work was described as frothy! I instantly felt bad for the author. My reaction couldn’t have been unlike Chandler’s when reading Sayers’s comments. But it’s not uncommon to see people on social media describe a film or a book as ‘turn your brain off fun’ or ‘you don’t have to think about it.’

This attitude of disposable, empty, forgettable storytelling is far too common. And is often used to excuse poorly told stories. 

When I started to write bad Blood, it was for my PhD at Kingston University. One of the most challenging aspects at the start was battling with the idea of how to make this book meaningful and live up to the quality of what a PhD novel should be. I was dead set on writing a historical noir. I wanted gangsters, femme fatales, and a tough-talking yet charming PI. I wanted it to be thrilling, fun, and sexy. 

But is that literary? Is that good enough? Hard-boiled fiction was birthed out of pulp magazines printed on cheap disposable paper. Were the tricks and tropes just as disposable today? Was there any literary appeal left? I wrestled with these questions. 

In the same essay, Raymond Chandler says that form doesn’t matter; it’s style that counts. What he meant was you can write any ole genre, but it is the author’s flare that makes it pop and stand out. Then, Chandler’s criticism of Sayers and his comments on style all clicked. I knew what I needed to do: escape into the genre. I needed to embrace the form shamelessly and respectfully while making it my own.

That’s what Chandler was getting at—there is no literature of escape in a derogatory sense. Meaning no single genre is less than simply because of its formula.

The filmmaker Robert Meyer Burnett once phrased what audiences are genuinely after: they want good stories told well. Genre is irrelevant. The form isn’t the it thing that makes something work. It’s all about style! The execution. That’s why you can read two books in the same genre and love one but hate the other. Audiences don’t seek out bad, forgettable, disposable art. So, we writers shouldn’t treat stories as such. When we’re hungry, we don’t go into a restaurant and say, ‘Give me the worst thing on the menu, please!’ We want something delicious. 

When I think about the book described as a frothy thriller, what the headline was trying to say was it’s a fun ride. The word choice of frothy was a mistake. The value of fiction doesn’t come from the seriousness of its content or ‘realism’, but from the joy the readers have with a well-executed story. That’s what Burnett means by a good story told well.

And that’s what I attempted to do with Bad Blood. It wasn’t about ‘writing literature’ or trying to make something more out of it. The form is the form. So I wrote it for the people who love noir fiction, who love historical fiction, who love Edinburgh, and tough and gritty atmospheres. There was no shame in embracing the tropes and trying to subvert a few along the way! If someone escapes into my book, that’s a beautiful achievement! 

So readers, feel free to escape into fiction! It’s not a bad thing. But do keep your brains switched on!

Bad Blood by Luke Deckard (Sharpe Books) Out Now

London 1922. American ex-pat Logan Bishop, suffering from shell-shock and an addiction to morphine, is working as a Private Investigator. When Logan’s father, Reverend Daniel Bishop, arrives from Chicago, desperate to see his son, Logan wants nothing to do with him. That is, until his father is brutally attacked. Daniel begs his son to find Greta Matas, a Bolshevik woman with an unknown connection to his father, in Edinburgh before she is murdered. Before Logan can learn more, his father slips into a coma. Logan takes the first train to Edinburgh. The journey proves far from routine, however, and two mysterious men follow the investigator out of Waverley Station. Logan soon discovers that Greta is missing and her son, Peter, is wanted for murder. The case begins to take a darker and deadlier turn than he ever imagined. As Edinburgh police suspect Logan of keeping information from them, the pressure to find Greta and her son increases. Secrets and lies are exposed as Logan clashes with Chicago gangsters, the authorities, and Edinburgh’s elite to expose the truth behind the woman's disappearance.

You can find Bad Blood on Amazon UK and Amazon US

More information about Dr Luke Deckard can be found on his website. You ca also find him on X @LukeWritesCrime. You can also find him on Facebook.

The Enduring Appeal of the Ghost Story

My third novel, Hazardous Spirits, takes place in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1923. It follows a woman, Evelyn Hazard, whose husband, Robert announces one day out of the blue that he has acquired an unexpected talent for speaking to the spirits of the dead. While nursing a loss of her own, Eveyln has to navigate a new world of Spiritualists and high-society eccentrics as she tries to determine if her husband is a fraud, unwell, or perhaps most frighteningly, if he’s telling the truth.

I wrote a large part of the novel during the Covid-19 national lockdowns in the UK, and perhaps like many people forced to spend longer physically in their homes than ever before, my thoughts turned to ghost stories. We have a powerful history of ghost stories in the UK, and across the nation there are many contenders battling it out for the title of the ‘most haunted’ castle, pub or hotel. Perhaps it’s the gloomy weather that has driven people indoors around a crackling fire, perhaps it's a hangover from the macabre inheritance of the Victorian imagination, or an awareness of the many layers of historical turbulence that saturate even the most humble village. Whatever the cause, ghost stories are a popular tradition across the UK, and the appeal of a spooky tale only increases as the days grow shorter. 

When the events of Hazardous Spirits open in 1923, the characters are trying to cope with a world that is not unlike our current moment, almost exactly 100 years later. In the early 1920s, society was still suffering the after-effects of the combined trauma of WW1 and the 1918 -1920 flu epidemic. In this moment, appetite for the esoteric became particularly popular, and the Spiritualist movement reached arguably the peak of its appeal, as people sought comfort for their grief.

Spiritualism as a movement emerged in response to the public mediumship of two young women, Kate and Maggie Fox in America in the late 1840s, who claimed the ability to channel spirits though rapping and knocking noises. The movement grew in popularity and influence on both sides of the Atlantic, adopted by some as a religious practice within a Spiritualist church, and for others a social phenomenon that promised thrilling and comforting messages from mediums in touch with disembodied spirits.

An example of one prominent Scottish advocate for Spiritualism is Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930) who is most well remembered as the creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle became involved in Spiritualist circles from the end of the 1880s and by 1916 he was more publicly associated with the movement. The loss of several close family members, including his son, Arthur Alleyne Kingsley, due to injuries inflicted by the war only served to reinforce Doyle’s belief in Spiritualism. Doyle went on to write several non-fiction books about Spiritualism, and in 1922 published The Coming of the Fairies, which defended the infamous set of photographs of allegedly real fairies taken by another pair of young female relatives, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths.

Both Kate and Maggie Fox and Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths eventually renounced their gifts for communing with the supernatural. Kate and Maggie Fox produced the ‘knocking’ sounds of their spiritual counterparts by clicking their joints. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths created their fairies initially as a hoax, by cutting out and posing with paper images held up by hatpins. But the stories catalysed by these young women had for a time seized the popular imagination, promising that a new horizon of spiritual encounters was only a few moments away.

Ultimately, the appeal of a good ghost story makes similar promises; familiar enough to be recognisable, with enough suggestion of the otherworldly to be spine-chilling. In Hazardous Spirits, it is just this kind of slippery struggle between falsehood and reality that makes Evelyn’s questions about her husband so difficult to answer. Throughout the novel, Evelyn changes her mind often about the possibility of life persisting beyond death, finding it hard to trust even her own instincts. As a reader, I have always felt that tales of the supernatural are often at their most terrifying when the hint of the paranormal interrupts and transforms the everyday. And as a writer, I’m interested in exploring the uncanny sense that what has previously been hidden may suddenly be revealed. After all, what could be more frightening than the ghost of your own secrets? 

Hazadous Spirits by Anbara Salam. (John Murray Press) Out Now

Edinburgh, 1923Evelyn Hazard is a young woman living a comfortable and unremarkable middle-class life. One day, her quiet existence is shattered when her steady, reliable husband Robert makes a startling announcement: he can communicate with the deadAs the couple are pulled into the spiritualist movement that emerged following the mass deaths caused by the First World War and the Spanish Flu, Evelyn's life becomes increasingly unsettled as dark secrets from her past threaten to surface.Faced with the prospect of losing all that is dear to her, Evelyn finds herself asking: is the man she loves a fraud, a madman or - most frighteningly - is he telling the truth?A gothic literary mystery, written in sparkling prose, Hazardous Spirits evokes the spirit of 1920s Edinburgh, in all its bohemian vibrancy.

More information about Anbara Salam and her work can be found on her website. You can also follow her on “X” at @anbara_salam and on nstagram @anbarasalam

Conan Doyle and Storytelling - Call For Papers

 

Edinburgh Conan Doyle Network Conference 

‘Conan Doyle and Storytelling’ 

10–11 December 2021 

Birkbeck, University of London

Keynote speakers: 

Professor Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling 

Professor Robert Hampson, Royal Holloway, University of London 

“‘Pray compose yourself, sir,’ said Holmes, ‘and let me have a clear account of who you are, and what it is that has befallen you.’” (‘The Beryl Coronet’) 

Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the greatest of all storytellers. He is best known and most enjoyed not for the subtlety of his characterisation or the profundity of his ideas, but as a master of narrative, in many different forms. It is because of his powers as a storyteller that his work not only endures in book form, but continues to captivate television and cinema audiences internationally. The conditions of his own time were propitious for an author with his gift for narrative. He was writing in a period described as ‘the Age of Storytellers’, which was also an age of literature in transition, and of emergent Modernism. We would welcome proposals for 20-minute papers, which consider Conan Doyle’s writing in all these wider contexts, and which might explore:

• Conan Doyle and genre: romance literature, detective fiction, historical fiction, the Gothic, sport, travel, and life-writing etc 

• Narrative and the market: Conan Doyle and publishing history and practice 

• Late-Victorian and early 20th-century shorter fiction 

• Neo-Victorian adaptation: Conan Doyle’s stories in the 20th and 21^st centuries 

• Conan Doyle and narratology 

• Character and action 

• Narrating the Empire: Conan Doyle and colonialism 

• Storytelling and Modernism 

• Conan Doyle’s narrators 

• Stories of Spiritualism and the supernatural 

  Please send abstracts of 200–300 words together with a brief biography to:- james.machin@birkbeck.ac.uk

  Deadline for proposals: - 31 July 2021 

  ‘Conan Doyle and Storytelling’ is hosted in partnership with the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies, and will be the third event associated with a new scholarly enterprise,The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle, sponsored by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Conan Doyle Estate. 

  Further information can be found here.

  
  

Edinburgh Conan Doyle Network Conference - Call for Papers

Conan Doyle in Edinburgh 

25th – 27th June, 2020

Edinburgh Napier University

Proposals are invited for a conference in Edinburgh about Arthur Conan Doyle. At the centre of the conference will be the relation between the writer and his native city, but papers about all aspects of his work and life will be welcome.

“I do not come before you as a stranger. I was born in Edinburgh. I spent my boyhood there. I was educated at the University, and I graduated there. I owe much to the old City” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch 25th Sept 1900.) Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on the 22nd of May 1859, and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1876 to 1881. Famously, Dr Joseph Bell, one of his professors, was said to be the inspiration for the character Sherlock Holmes.  Although Conan Doyle only spent 12 years of his life in Edinburgh, it was the city which shaped him and out of which his stories grew. As Val McDermid notes: “those early years in Edinburgh played a crucial role in his development as a writer” (2009). This conference will explore the interplay between city and writer, and we invite broad, imaginative and interdisciplinary interpretations on the topic of ‘Conan Doyle in Edinburgh’. We also welcome proposals for papers on other topics concerning the writings and life of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Key note speakers: Owen Dudley Edwards and Nicholas Daly

We will also be running a virtual conference alongside the physical conference which we hope will encourage greater participation for those unable to attend for financial, environmental or other reasons. If selected, the online participants will be asked to record their presentation which will be hosted on our website before, during and after the conference. Viewers and attendees of the conference will have the opportunity to ask questions of the online participants. The online participants will be included in the conference programme.

‘Conan Doyle in Edinburgh’ is the second event associated with a new scholarly enterprise, The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle, sponsored by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Selected papers from across the conference will be considered for book publication.

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers, panels of three papers, posters, or virtual attendance, on topics which can include, but are not limited to:

Conan Doyle and Edinburgh

Conan Doyle and Cities

Conan Doyle and Medicine

Conan Doyle and other Authors

Conan Doyle’s Campaigns

Conan Doyle and his Fiction

Travel and Empire Writing

Science and Science Fiction

Spiritualism and the Supernatural

The City and Crime Writing

Editing Conan Doyle

Proposals should be no more than 300 words, and submissions should include a 50 word biography. Online participants should note on their proposal their wish to be considered for the virtual conference. If you are only able to attend for one day please state which day in your proposal. Proposals should be sent in Word or .odt format to Linda Dryden, Douglas Kerr and Jonathan Wild at: edinburghconandoyle@gmail.com

Deadline for proposals: Friday 31st January 2020

Attendance: full conference £200, single day £75, virtual conference £45. A social events calendar, including opportunities for visits, walks and planned meals, will be sent to participants before the conference. Conference attendees will have Saturday afternoon free to explore Edinburgh.

The Immortal Sherlock Holmes

George Mann is the author of the Newbury and Hobbes and The Ghost series of novels, as well as numerous short stories, novellas and audiobooks. He has edited and written a number of Sherlock books including Encounters of Sherlock Holmes, More Encounters of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: The Spirit Box.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sent Holmes tumbling to his apparent death over the Reichenbach Falls in 1893, it was, to all intents and purposes, the end of the world's foremost consulting detective. Doyle originally had no intention of reviving the character - in his mind, Holmes was dead, the stories were over, and the author could spend his days concerning himself with other things, much to his relief. 

 
What Doyle didn't realise, however, was that he'd come to the decision too late. Holmes had already outgrown his creator. Adored by the reading masses, Holmes had become a hero, a legend, a figurehead. There was a public outcry, and it wasn't long before Doyle felt compelled to revive the character, explaining how Holmes had survived the fall through his usual brand of cunning and resourcefulness. 

 
Holmes has continued his adventures ever since, persevering long after Doyle's death, still solving seemingly impossible crimes, even now.

What's intriguing is how Holmes, perhaps more than any other fictional character in the English language (and far beyond) has transcended his creator, and, indeed, the fiction in which his story began.

For Holmes has become more than a simple character, a device for telling clever detective stories - Holmes has passed into myth, like Hercules, Frankenstein's monster, or Romeo and Juliet before him. 

The line between fiction and history has been irrevocably blurred. Holmes is so ubiquitous that those unfamiliar with the original stories sometimes mistakenly believe the character to be a real historical figure. Indeed - pilgrims can visit his house on Baker Street in London, and his ongoing adventures are chronicled in any number of stage plays, television series, radio plays, novels and stories. 

 
Why is it that Holmes should have endured where so many other characters have passed into obscurity?

Perhaps it's because, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle created a template for the modern detective story, that even now percolates through almost all crime and mystery fiction on the shelves in bookshops and libraries around the world. Perhaps it's because that same template has been adopted by television, and that every time we sit down to watch an onscreen detective take on a new case, we're reminded of the original master, and his outlandish and fiendishly clever techniques - techniques that are often imitated, adopted or borrowed by those who came in his wake. Perhaps it's simply a tribute to the remarkable portrait Doyle painted of two men, Holmes and his indefatigable Boswell, Dr. John Watson, of their atypical friendship, and the fact that these characters continue to loom larger than life. 

 
What's clear is that many of us feel a deep affection for the character, and a certain responsibility to continue his adventures; to continue chronicling the exploits of this great master, so he is never forgotten. More than that, there's a selfish impulse, too, to somehow become a small part of Holmes's on-going story, to contribute, to give something back to a character who has given so much to us. 

 
As each generation finds a new way to engage with the character - some coming to him through the original canon, others through modern television adaptations or pastiches - a new group of people are inspired to create new and fascinating adventures for him. 

It's in this way that Holmes lives on, and will surely live on for centuries to come. As his fall over the raging Reichenbach Falls proved all those years ago - Holmes is essentially immortal. 

Associates of Sherlock Holmes Edited by George Mann (£7.99, Titan Books)

For the first time, famous associates of the Great Detective – clients, colleagues, and villains – tell their own stories in these brand-new adventures. Follow Inspector Lestrade as he and Sherlock Holmes pursue a killer to rival Jack the Ripper; sit with Mycroft Holmes as he solves a case from the Diogenes Club; take a drink with Irene Adler and Dr Watson in a Parisian café; and join Colonel Sebastian Moran on the hunt for a supposedly mythical creature…  

You can find more information about George Mann and his work on his website.  You can also follow him on Twitter @George_Mann and follow him on Facebook.

Three Seminal Sherlocks

As many have pointed out, if ever an actor was born for a part, Basil Rathbone was born to play Sherlock Holmes.  His aristocratic profile with the aquiline nose make him a dead ringer for the Holmes of the Paget illustrations from the original stories.  Rathbone holds a pipe with great ease, and his mellifluous baritone has all the requisite weight and authority.  In the original two 1939 movies set in the Victorian period, his Holmes commands the screen, and the black-and-white fits the stories, especially The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The only real disappointment is Nigel Bruce as a bumbling comic Dr. Watson, a role he would continue to play in subsequent movies.  Updating the later films to a contemporary setting (1940's London) was a bit jarring, as were Nazi villains and the like, and the results were more pedestrian and formulaic than with the original two films.  A low point comes with a deformed actor playing the "Hoxton Creeper" in The Pearl of Death.

Still, for several decades up until the 1980's, Rathbone’s visage was generally what popped into your head at the mention of Sherlock Holmes.  That all changed in 1984 when Jeremy Brett burst onto the television screen in the elaborate Granada productions with spectacular location shooting.  Brett also seemed born to play the part.  With his pomaded black hair swept back and his long thin frame, he also resembled the Paget Holmes.  However, the contrast with Rathbone was striking.

Rathbone was always calm and self-possessed, while Brett radiated nervous energy, was slightly manic with a neurotic edge.  You were never certain what his Holmes might do.  His movements were often explosive: wrenching a glass from his pocket, throwing himself on the turf to look for footprints, or the like.  He was edgy and unbalanced, not poised and calm like Rathbone.  You could well believe his Holmes might have turned to drugs and that he had some dark depths indeed.  This Holmes preferred cigarettes to the pipe, something the chain-smoking Brett encouraged to allow him to smoke on camera.

Brett’s voice was part of the difference.  Despite some deeper undertones (perhaps because he smoked so much!), his was a tenor voice.   Brett had started out as a singing actor and had been told that with work, he might become an operatic tenor.  When he cries out or exclaims loudly, the voice has a piercing clarion quality.  The voice with its dramatic shifts in intensity contributes to that sense that his Holmes is unstable and unpredictable.  Unlike with the always affable Rathbone, you might think twice before inviting Brett’s Holmes to a dinner party!

Sadly, as most of his fans know, Brett’s health visibly deteriorated over the nearly ten year run of the Granada series.  By the end, the thin elegance and vitality of his early Holmes had vanished.  Still, he laboured on in very ill health.

Brett was lucky to have two very good Watsons, David Burke and Edward Hardwicke, both of whom were clearly men of intelligence and sympathy, far cries from the comic-relief Watson of Nigel Bruce.

I think there is a rather straight line from Rathbone, to Brett, to Benedict Cumberbatch. We could never had arrived at Cumberbatch’s portrayal if Brett hadn’t led the way first.  Cumberbatch’s Holmes is also quixotic and excitable.  However, once again we have Holmes with a commanding baritone voice.  Cumberbatch certainly captures the arrogance of the character and his unpredictability.  And who knew that Holmes was made for a smart phone!

However, for my taste, all this strangeness gets carried a bit too far.  Portraying him as a frustrated neurotic virgin in the episode with a very unusual Irene Adler reduced his character to almost a caricature.  Ditto with making him always socially clueless and awkward.  Rathbone’s Holmes was always polite, and Brett’s Holmes could be charming in his social dealings when he wished to be.  Cumberbatch’s Holmes is too often simply boorish or rude.  Suggesting that he has Asperger’s or some other mental illness also seem to diminish the character.

I don’t fault Cumberbatch as an actor for this.  I think he is very good.  It is the scripts that are the problem.  I liked some of the early episodes in the Sherlock series, but 2016's The Abominable Bride was, for me, a major disappointment.  At first, I loved the traditional Victorian Holmes and Watson as played by Cumberbatch and Freeman and all the wealth of Victorian decor and costume, but they lost me when they started flipping back and forth in time between the 2010's and the Victorian period.  The script was too clever by far.  Suggesting that certain scenes were simply a drug hallucination was just lame, as was the feminist cabal behind the murders.

However, the resulting mishmash did indeed resemble a "bad trip," one you might undergo from taking hallucinogenic drugs after binge-watching various old and new versions of Sherlock Holmes on video.  I wish they would give Cumberbatch a chance to play a more straight Victorian Sherlock Holmes.  What we saw of him early on in The Abominable Bride did show that he, too, was made for the part, and Martin Freeman as Watson was a nice blend of comedy and compassion.

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The White Worm by Sam Siciliano (Titan Books) £7.99 is out now.

Sherlock Holmes and his cousin, Dr Henry Vernier, travel to Whitby, to investigate a curious case on behalf of a client. He has fallen in love, but a mysterious letter has warned him of the dangers of such a romance. The woman is said to be under a druidic curse, doomed to take the form of a gigantic snake. Locals speak of a green glow in the woods at night, and a white apparition amongst the trees. Is there sorcery at work, or is a human hand behind the terrors of Diana’s Grove?

More information  about Sam Sciliano and his books can be found on his website.